The Scorpio Illusion Read Online Free PDF Page A

an asset on this assignment.”
    The chairman of MI-6 leaned forward over his desk, his rigid right hand lagging behind his left. “His name is Tyrell Nathaniel Hawthorne the Third. He’s the son of a professor of American literature at the University of Oregon, and the circumstances of his separation from naval intelligence were very unpleasant, indeed. And, yes, he’d be an enormous asset, but no one in Washington’s intelligence circles can recruit him. They’ve tried strenuously, giving him a lot of background, hoping to change his mind; they can’t move him. He has very little regard for such people, believing as he does that they don’t know the difference between the truth and a lie. He’s told them all to go to hell.”
    “Good Lord!” cried Geoffrey Cooke. “You knew about my holidays, you knew all along. You even knew I’d met him.”
    “A pleasant three-day sail through the Leewards, along with your friend Ardisonne, code name Richelieu.”
    “You
bastard.
”
    “Come now, Officer Cooke, how can you? Incidentally, former Lieutenant Commander Hawthorne is on his way to the marina in British Gorda, where I suspecthe’ll have trouble with his auxiliary engine. Your plane leaves for Anguilla at five o’clock, plenty of time to pack. From there, you and your friend Ardisonne will take a small private aircraft to Virgin Gorda.” The chairman of MI-6, Special Branch, flashed a brilliant smile. “It should be a splendid reunion.”
D EPARTMENT OF S TATE , W ASHINGTON , D.C.
    Seated around the table in the continuously swept conference room were the secretaries of state and defense, the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the chiefs of Army and Navy Intelligence, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To the left of each man was his selected aide, a high-level subordinate beyond security reproach. Chairing the meeting was the secretary of state. He spoke.
    “You’ve all gotten the same information I have, so we can dispense with extraneous introductions. There’ll be some of you here who think we’re overreacting, and until this morning, I must admit I would have been counted among you. A lone female terrorist with an obsession to assassinate the President, and thereby trigger the assassinations of the political leaders of Great Britain, France, and Israel, seemed just too farfetched. However, at six o’clock this morning I received a call from our director of the CIA, and then at eleven he called me again, and I began to change my mind. Would you please clarify, Mr. Gillette?”
    “I’ll do my best, Mr. Secretary,” said the portly DCI. “Yesterday our source in Bahrain who monitors the financial transactions from the Baaka Valley was killed an hour after he alerted our undercover contact that a half million dollars had been transferred to Zurich’s Crédit Suisse. The amount wasn’t startling, but when our asset in Zurich tried to reach his own source at the bank, an off-the-books, highly paid source, he couldn’tget anywhere. When later he pressed—anonymously, of course, merely an old friend—he was told that the man had flown to London on business. Later still, our asset returned to his apartment, where there was a message on his answering machine. It was from his source, who certainly wasn’t in London, because he asked, apparently rather desperately, that our man meet him at a café in Dudendorf, a city twenty-odd miles north of Zurich. Our asset drove there but his source never showed up.”
    “What do you make of it?” asked the chief of Army G-2.
    “He was taken out to eliminate the money trail,” answered a burly man with thinning red hair who was seated at the DCI’s left. “That’s a projection, not confirmed,” he added.
    “Based on what?” questioned the secretary of defense.
    “On logic,” the Agency aide continued curtly. “First Bahrain’s killed for passing the initial information, then Zurich builds a